Twitter withdrawal is easy. I did post a couple of tweets other than links; they're the topic of Thursday morning's main post. But none of these links went live on Twitter first! Twits have to find them here!
Activism
Tweakable for non-Christians, recommended for people who want to be activists but don't see how they can. At the very least, if you chant, reflect, pray/meditate, other ideas may come to you. And we can't rule out the possibility that prayer/meditation may make a difference, all by itself.:
Books
If you like whimsical writing and animals, you must read Tom Cox's "badgery" post promoting his "rather badgery" 2017 novel, 21st Century Yokel.
Music
Because Johnny Cash was considered a rockabilly singer who corrupted June Carter's country music, and because some people wanted to show disapproval of second marriages while the original spouse was alive, I missed quite a lot of June's and Johnny's songs on the radio, even when they were popular during my lifetime. (They were famous before I was born!) So I never heard this one before, and when someone dug it up and shared it I laughed out loud.
Philosophy
The book I'm reading is Robert W. Malone's Lies My Government Told Me. It's long and, to me, arid, because it's about the coronavirus panic and people have been banging on about COVID-19 for so long that the word is starting to make my eyes glaze over, just a bit. Lots of food for thought; Wednesday's main post is obviously not part of the book review, but it goes off on a mental tangent that was provoked by the book. It is spinach for the brain. You need to read it. For those whose computers read Kindle e-books, free copies are available from CHD. Anyway, as the doctor leads up to another factual point, he throws in this excellent quote just as an explanation of something someone's about to say:
"On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good—that is, consider the good of others as well as one’s own good.
Malone MD MS, Robert W . Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense) (pp. 320-321). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition. "
That's the pithiest version I've seen...my definition of "the Highest Good" invokes a Higher Power, but sticking firmly in this world for now, my objection to the idea that "altruism" would be desirable, if it were real, is that it assumes a zero sum of good. If I mortify my selfish desires in order to gratify your selfish desires, and you and I are of equal moral value, the overall balance of good and bad is exactly the same as if I trample on your selfish desires in order to gratify my own. Arguably the attempt at altruism is even worse, since my own selfish desires are likely to have some basis in an actual need that I can understand better, and have more responsibility for meeting, than whatever I presume you to need. So we can only begin to think about the Highest Good by recognizing that it has to consider and balance your and my desires equally. What you and I legitimately want is very seldom in conflict in the real world. Even in a situation of extreme scarcity, suppose a famine where there's not as much food available as either of us really needs to eat for health, I legitimately want--and so do you, if you have a healthy conscience--both to eat and to give you a chance to eat, so what we really want is to share the available food.
When well-fed people consider famine as a philosophical exercise, we tend to have an emotional reaction like "I'd want you to have the last loaf of bread from the wrecked ship." And why? "Because... well... I want to be 'good.' I want to be 'altruistic.'" So we're still talking about a selfish desire to hoard all the moral virtue available and burden the other person with guilt, which we're probably trying to project onto person from our own abundant supply of selfish acts in the past. That "altruistic" reaction is selfish, and nasty, too. That's why, as C.S. Lewis observed in The Screwtape Letters, when each side of a family disagreement is "contending frankly for what [they want]," the dispute has a chance of remaining within the limits of reason and good will, but when people are trying to "be unselfish," their hostilities become vicious.
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